Miwa Aoki Takeuchi

This study demonstrates the possibility of co-creation that invites participants into the artistic process itself, fostering shared ownership of knowledge production and enabling new forms of storytelling that bridge artistic expression and lived experience. We explore the affordances of co-creating illustrated stories by centering the previously unshared stories of families forcibly displaced by war and systemic violence. We engaged in workshops to co-create visual stories which integrate their pre- and post-migration experiences with schooling, especially in the context of mathematics learning. The co-created illustration reflects the participants’ desired ways of depicting gender and race, with nuanced depictions of their emotional journey, holding both the struggles and moments of joy. Extending art-based methods further, we discuss how the co-created stories could convey the participants’ embodied experiences and their everyday acts of exercising agency to address power and inequity.

Colonial monolingual norms are a present oppressive force within schooling spaces, with a direct assimilative target on the linguistic practices of historically marginalized peoples, histories, and knowledge systems. For racially minoritized multilingual refugee learners, the space of in‐school science learning can be experienced as an involuntary detachment from linguistic wholeness, intergenerational ways of knowing, and community practices. Our work offers a disruption of the deficit‐based narratives that leave the brilliances associated with multilingualism invisibilized. Based on facilitator reflections and video‐based interaction analyses, our findings shed light on the pedagogy of whole languaging hearts that actively resist colonial and racialized linguistic norms and center social interactions and relations transcending divides across languages, geopolitical locations, and species. The pedagogy of whole languaging hearts was enacted to embrace how children and teachers located themselves within land‐based networks of interrelated communities. We offer to look at this network intersectionally, lovingly, and relationally to imagine otherwise, refusing the predefined disciplinary possibilities for eco‐ and socially just science futures together. Extending further the literature on translanguaging, our article focuses on the transformative possibilities of languaging emerging from our work with diasporic refugee children hailing from the “Middle East,” which transcends the borders of the named languages of Arabic, Kurmanji, and English. With the pedagogical enactment of languaging with whole hearts, we demonstrate how teachers can open space for science teaching grounded in the lives and worlds of multilingual refugee children and in embodied interactions on the land. We argue that ways of coming to know sciences are inseparable from our sense of community, stories, and relations.

This symposium advances walking methodologies, and the kinds of learning and research relations that emerge through walking, as a significant process for "road making" toward more equitable futures in the Learning Sciences. The papers gathered here highlight diverse forms of walking together: from cultural anthropological research (Lee & Ingold, 2006) to walking with and alongside community activists (Curnow, Davis, & Asher, 2018; Takeuchi & Aquino Ishihara, 2021), to walking as learning and coming to know with and from the land (Marin & Bang, 2018), to reimagining place from transnational perspectives (Adams, 2013), and wayfaring as figuring both science and identities (Rahm, Gonsalves, & Lachaîne, 2022). Through dialogue within and across papers, we emphasize the ways in which walking methodologies make visible materiality and relations with the more-than-human world (Marin, 2020), as well as effects and experiences of inequity, with attention to co-constructing caring and equitable relations through shared walking.